Which thunderbolt hard drive?

Hello I'm looking for an External hard drive with thunderbolt for my Macbook pro to use for my video editing in FCPX.

I found out this 2 drives that have the same price (around 200$US) but I'm not sure which to choose:


G-Technology 1TB G-Drive Mobile Hard Drive with Thunderbolt


1TB Capacity
7200 rpm Speed
Transfer Rates up to 136 MB/s
Bus Powered via Thunderbolt/USB
Time Machine Compatible

USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt Cables Included
Pre-Formatted for Mac
Can be Reformatted for Windows



LaCie 1TB Rugged Thunderbolt External Hard Drive


1TB Storage Capacity
5400 rpm Rotational Speed
1 x USB 3.0 Port
1 x Integrated Thunderbolt Cable
Bus Powered

Shock, Dust, Water Resistant
AES 256-bit Encryption


The G-Drive is 7200 rpm agaisnt the 5400 rpm on the Lacie, does that mean it's going to be faster at editing in FCPX?

Can anyone help me? thanks!

Neither of those are going to be much different. Once a (mechanical spinning) drive has been full once, the 5400 vs 7200 is a moot point.

You really want a raid, you can get portable raid enclosures and buy 2X 1 or 2TB drives, then you'd have a 4TB portable raid which is twice as fast, and still portable. I recommend at least 200MB/s for HD editing.

But would any of these thunderbolt drives be faster in video editing process when compared to an external 2.0 USB? Or compared to my internal HDD drive?

Thanks for the RAID suggestion, i'll take a look but they seem more expensive

USB 2.0 can read and write data about 1/3rd the speed of a 5400RPM drive. USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt can run the drive at maximum potential with plenty of bandwidth left.

This looks like a pretty good deal at $299, and the thunderbolt cable is built in, for another $100 you are doubling your storage, for another $1000 still you can quadruple it to get 4TB for $399

store.apple.com/us/product/HFCN2ZM/A/wd-...aid-storage?fnode=5f

If you are going to use it for editing, it should either be a RAID, or an SSD drive. Right now the RAIDS give you more GBs per dollar.

That western digital drive is nice, the 4TB is about twice as thick though. I "borrowed" one from best buy for a few days when I needed to get some footage from someone but didn't have a hard drive to put it on. It's a very nice product and you'll probably just want to hold it and look at it for five minutes.

I just ordered a new rMBP and the 2TB version of this drive to go with it. I paid $250 for the drive on Amazon. I didn't get the 4TB because it's just too big and I'd rather not have that much data on one drive that could easily be dropped or lost or damaged in some way (like the built in cable breaking...)

When I tested it I got about 230MB/s when it was empty, after filling it about 50% performance went down to 200MB/s which is still pretty fast, but I haven't seen performance drop like that on other drives when I fill them up.

The biggest problem with this drive is the horrid sound the fan makes. It's very small and you're gonna want to wear headphones so you don't have to hear it.

Overall it's the fastest portable drive out there for the price.

Raposanegra
I would recommend you read this article by Larry Jordan to get a handle about drives and what is needed for throughput speeds according to the type of video you do.

www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/2559

I really want to stress that you also should make back-ups on separate drives (At least 2 BUs if you can). It is not a question of if a drive will fail, but when it fails do you have a way to restore your data.

IMHO do not use 5400rpm drives. Also do not use USB2, way too slow, use USB3 or TB connections.

If doing a 2 drive RAID0, I prefer to use Disk Utility to format a software RAID instead of hardware based RAIDs. Hardware RAIDs when they fail cannot be recovered. Data from all drives is lost. There is very little to be gained with a hardware based RAID 0 or 1 and it increases the cost for the unit. I use a StarTech 2bay USB3 with UASP (faster transfer protocol) for a simple 2 drive RAID. I can then pop out the RAID drives and then pop in other drives for general storage and back-ups.
The other advantage of a dock or even an empty multi-bay drive enclosure is you do not void your warranty if you trade drives in the units and they are cheaper.

Hope this helps, Greg

I use single SSD for my libray including all my media. I work witk very short projects so space is not an issue. Now I wonder is RAID HD always faster even with only two disks. I have had the feeling that four disks RAID is the minimum to outperform a single SSD. I would be gratefull if somone could clarify this. I am not professional.

It depends on what type of projects you're doing. I have done quite a few long-form projects on Lacie Firewire 800 drives with no issues. They are not that fast, maybe 60-80 MB/sec. For long form I mean up to 2 hours with typically no more than one layer of video playing back at any one time. For shorter, more layer-intensive projects like spots or sizzle pieces where I may have 10-20 layers of video, text and graphics I use a Promise Thunderbolt RAID.

Thanks everyone for the explanation

At the moment i have an internal SSD where FCPX is installed and my video projects and files are on my other internal HDD.

My question at the moment is if I'm going to notice any difference from editing on my internal HDD or editing on the external Lacie HDD with Thunderbolt?

I know the RAID would be better but I can't afford it at the moment.

Hi Makki,
I sometimes use a ssd drive to edit from (media drive) and my boot drive is a ssd. (rMBP mostly). I also use a 2 drive RAID0 in an external USB3 dock. Looking for a 4 or 5 bay enclosure.
Yes it does take approx 4 7200rpm drives to equal the throughput of a modern ssd. The drawback to ssds are the $/GBs. You can buy hdds far cheaper and with vastly greater GB(TB).
Also remember that performance goes down when drives fill up so you still need to keep 15-25% of free space on the media drives for good read/write speeds. Again easier to do on big hdds. If you totally fill a drive and attempt to write on it, you may experience spinning beach ball or even crashes.
Another problem with ssds is that Apple does not support "trim" mode for 3rd party ssds. Ssd/flash drives have X number of writes to each cell. Without proper trim and garbage collection, the drive may just keep writing to the same cells each and every time and therefore you may experience shorter drive life. You can enable "Trim" via Terminal, but you have to re-enable after each OS update.
Finally, don't forget to budget for back-up drives.
Hope this helps, Greg

Raposanegra,
You will not achieve any faster speeds using an external TB enclosure with only 1 drive vs using an internal drive. The drive itself is the limiting factor. A single hdd 7200rpm can only transfer around 120-160MB/sec and both TB and internal PCIe SATA ports are much faster than this.
Hope this helps, Greg

Thank you all for this clarification

Makki

i'm looking for a new 1TB HDD,
can anyone help me to find the best one?

I'm getting 600mbs + using 2 SSD in zero Raid...as long as you back up each session..this cant be beat IMO.
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJ3YEH0/ref...05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1